I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for waking up a system and, in particular, to an apparatus for waking up a system after the system enters into a suspend-to-ram mode, a suspend-to-disk mode or a shutdown mode.
II. Description of the Prior Art
Nowadays, people usually store a great amount of personal information, pictures or movies on a desktop computer or a notebook.
The conventional way for protecting the safety of a computer is by entering a password for verification after the operation system (OS) is ready or by using a basic input/output system (BIOS) for verification when powering on the computer. However, the verification may not always work because the operation system (OS) or the basic input/output system (BIOS) can be deciphered.
Nowadays, in times when personal privacy cannot be overemphasized, other ways are needed to protect the safety of a computer.
Taiwan patent 374871 proposes a method to protect the safety of a computer without entering into the operation system (OS) or the basic input/output system (BIOS) of the computer, which is, however, based on a general computer framework, wherein input/output signals through the USB are managed by a south bridge if the computer peripheral device is a universal serial bus (USB) or by a super IO if the computer peripheral device is a personal system/2 (PS/2) interface. The PS/2-interface was very popular for interfacing a keyboard. However, the keyboard with a USB-interface has become the main stream nowadays.
Because super IO does not have a USB host interface, the method proposed in Taiwan patent 374871 cannot be applied if a keyboard with a USB-interface is used.